Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Life has a way of teaching us things that organized educational systems (A.K.A. school) just doesn’t fully prepare us for and in my opinion; The School of Life tends to be a bit more successful. Though I personally have nothing against organized educational systems and in fact love to learn, I do remember thinking many, many times as a sat in class after class “When am I ever going to use this in the real world”? To date I have never had to recall much of what I learned in history class, nor had to conduct science experiments using beakers and Petri dishes and with spell-check and calculators what good were all those math and spelling tests I had to take in elementary school, man what a waste of time! As is painfully apparent, I am a fan and life-time student of The School of Life mainly because it has actually prepared me for the difficult things that I have encountered in my life and the things I have learned to love and cherish so much. In organized educational systems I was always told that I should try to find a job that would bring in the most money but never really given the idea that I should do something that I loved. Remember those test we took in high school that were suppose to help determine what professional field we should go into such as business, medicine or teaching, the thing is I don’t remember any of my friends cheerfully running down the hall with the good news that their test suggested they become an artist, why because our world doesn’t really see being as artist as an actual career but more as a past time.

When I was in high school and even in the first few years of college, I had no idea of what I wanted to do but I did know I wanted to do something that allowed me to express my creativity but I couldn’t seem to figure out just how to tie them all up into one profession so instead I studied various subjects such as Art, Photography, Journalism, Teaching, then finally and really now that I think about it, I’m not sure why but I ended up settling on Criminal Justice… This, as you can see is so far off the Richter scale from the areas I studied in my early educational yeas. I have always been an artist (studied art in high school, was in the art club, wrote for my school and college newspaper…) but in the organized educational system or what many life to call school, people told me that getting an Art degree would get me nowhere in life and I was pushed to do something more “substantial” with myself even if I had no passion for what I was “gently nudged” to do. But now I know where my passions lie and with this knowledge I was able to understand that my previous search for something creative would come out in the form of writing and of course I still paint in my free time but a lot of my visual creativity now goes into what I cook. So folks there you have it, what I have learned from The School of Life is that I am a writer who loves to cook! And what have I learned from the organized educational system (A.K.A. school), is that you can spend a lot of money and time to get a piece of paper and never really use it.